Cross-border payments weren’t built for 24/7 operation, but that’s changing fast.

Almost overnight, you could say.

For decades, cross-border relied on business-hour cutoffs, batch processing, correspondent handoffs, and manual exception handling. It was effective and remains surprisingly durable. But it was never designed for a world in which customers expect money to move as seamlessly on Sunday night as on Tuesday morning.

That expectation is no longer limited to domestic payments. Treasurers increasingly manage liquidity in real time. Digital commerce operates around the clock. Banks and corporates expect visibility into status at every step. More and more, customers don’t distinguish between domestic and cross-border payments. They simply want results.

Higher expectations were a key focus during Bottomline’s recent webinar, When Cross-Border Goes Instant: Your 24/7 Readiness Plan. Moderated by Christian Antrobus, Head of Global Solutions Consulting for Financial Messaging at Bottomline, the discussion featured Erin Moore and Tony Clark of Swift, along with Bottomline Solution Consultant Zach Mabe.

The panel covered a lot of ground, including upcoming Swift deadlines in November 2026, which moved the whole discussion from “having the tools in place” to “you must use them,” especially for fraud investigations and to meet new demands around data quality.

What came across unambiguously is that the industry already has the infrastructure to support faster payments. What banks need now is an operating model that can deliver predictable outcomes 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

 

New Standard for Cross-Border Payments

The global payments network is not broken. Far from it.

As Tony Clark noted, Swift connects more than 11,500 institutions worldwide and indirectly reaches some four billion bank accounts. “The network works,” he said.

The challenge is that customer expectations have moved beyond the successful transmission of payment messages. What matters now is whether a payment arrives predictably, transparently, and without unnecessary friction.

“The real gap is predictability,” said Swift’s Erin Moore. “If outcomes vary, we don’t care about speed.” That insight gets to the heart of what’s changing. A payment that travels quickly but gets delayed by data, sanctions screening, or downstream repairs creates uncertainty. In a real-time treasury environment, uncertainty hurts trust. That won’t do.

“If your customer has uncertainty, they’re not going to do business with you,” Moore said.

Clark added that these expectations reflect a broader turn in how businesses and consumers interact with digital services. “We live in an instantaneous world,” he said. “Payment experience and customer expectations are what’s driving the industry.”

The migration to ISO 20022 has laid the foundation for the next stage. Clark noted that 97% of former MT 103 messages on the Swift network are now sent as ISO 20022 pacs.008 messages. Richer, more structured data enables better automation, more accurate screening, and greater transparency.

But, as Moore observed, “Data is no longer the constraint. It’s the execution.”

 

Rallying for Readiness

Moving to instant cross-border payments is not primarily a technology issue. It’s operational. “It’s a readiness problem,” Moore said.

Historically, banks relied on operations teams to repair payment exceptions after transactions entered the processing flow. But that model doesn’t scale in a 24/7 environment. “When you have a human in the payments chain, it just does not allow for that 24 by 7 processing,” Moore added.

Bottomline’s Zach Mabe said the burden is increasingly on straight-through processing (STP) to reduce manual intervention wherever possible. “The key to 24/7 is STP,” he said.

That means using automation, machine learning, and AI to address repetitive repair tasks, sanctions, false positives, and routing decisions. It also means implementing predictive controls that identify potential issues before they interrupt transactions.

“The predictive control aspect is identifying the risk early,” Mabe said.

Resilience is equally important. Payments cannot stop because a sanctions engine slows down, a fraud platform has an outage, or a core system goes offline for some reason. Panelists agreed that banks need redundancy and contingency mechanisms that allow operations to continue in such cases, without client impact.

What ‘good’ looks like today, Moore said, is a model in which “manual intervention becomes the exception and not the norm.” From a customer perspective, the goal is consistency. A payment sent to Singapore on a Saturday evening should perform as reliably as one sent to London on a Monday morning.

“It’s not just about speed,” she said. “It’s about predictability.”

 

November Marks a Critical Milestone (Again)

Some institutions view ISO 20022 as a completed migration project. In reality, many of the consequential changes are ahead.

In a kind of replay of the November 2025 rush to readiness, Swift will begin enforcing structured and hybrid postal address requirements in November 2026. Payments containing non-compliant free-text address information may be rejected. It’s a real concern.

“Rules are changing, timelines are real, and they’re mandatory,” Moore said. “If you put an unstructured address on the network, it’s going to reject.”

Clark emphasized that banks should already be working with corporate clients and counterparties to prepare. “Have those conversations now,” he cautioned.

Mabe echoed that advice, noting that corporate payment initiators need to provide beneficiary information in formats that will be accepted under the new standards.

This industry is also formalizing exception handling through Swift case management. Instead of relying on ad hoc emails and manual follow-up, institutions will use structured workflows and standardized status messages to investigate and resolve issues.

“Ad hoc handling of exceptions and investigations is no longer viable in this 24/7 world,” Moore said. Swift is reinforcing these changes through a new scheme that defines measurable service expectations across participants. The emphasis is moving from transmitting messages to delivering a uniform payment experience, from initiation to beneficiary credit. “The scheme is about making outcomes consistent,” she said.

The practical implication is that banks remaining dependent on manual repair and loosely structured processes have a fairly brief window in which to modernize.

 

Preparing for a Multi-Rail Future

The same capabilities required for instant cross-border payments will also help banks support emerging payment models. Clark said Swift expects a “dual rail” future in which traditional infrastructure coexists with tokenized deposits, digital assets, and distributed ledger technologies.

Interoperability is the driver. “You can no longer negotiate lack of coordination,” Moore stressed. Banks that treat ISO 20022 as a data model rather than a messaging standard will be better positioned to support multiple rails and asset classes.

As Mabe noted, “A payment is a payment is a payment,” with market-specific rules applied at the end of each process. The next 12 to 24 months will show which institutions are ready and which need to show some hustle.

Banks should focus on improving data quality, increasing straight-through processing, implementing predictive controls, strengthening operational resilience, and preparing for the new requirements effective November 2026.

Bottomline’s Antrobus summed up the session and the challenges discussed, saying that success in instant cross-border payments “isn’t about one system or one participant. It’s about how those systems and players behave together.”

The network is already in place. The opportunity is to build an operating model that delivers a consistent, transparent, and always-on payment experience that business banking customers now demand.

As Moore said, “You can’t run a real-time business on a non-real-time operating model.”